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This constant pushing of stories about Fake News and Misinformation makes it really feel like there's a concerted effort to alter public opinion on censorship a
by nprz 6y ago
This constant pushing of stories about Fake News and Misinformation makes it really feel like there's a concerted effort to alter public opinion on censorship and free speech.
- tmp5690 6y agoAn effort which is as old as history itself.
- theplague42 6y agoMaybe the authors think that misinformation is currently a bigger issue than censorship?
- goalieca 6y agoWhere to draw the line between misinformation and the government approved version of the truth. The facts of any matter are not always so simple and lies by omission can be as misleading as any falsehood. Our justice system tries to resolve this through an adversarial system. It’s not perfect but I can’t imagine allowing any single entity to determine what the truth is.
- yokaze 6y agoHow about drawing the line at the government? My understanding is though, that this is a bit of a straw-mans argument. There is no credible proposal to only allow the government approved version of truth. I thought the marketplace of ideas was a popular concept in the US.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoyou are misinformed: "But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member
- Jtsummers 6y agoHow does that at all rebut what the person you're responding to has said? I've read your quote multiple times trying to see how it at all presents a "credible proposal to only allow the government approved version of truth."
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoits a government official speaking about the dangers of unfettered free speech. I'm genuinely at a loss as to what you want me to offer. perhaps if you explained it to me as though I was a small child.
- Jtsummers 6y ago> perhaps if you explained it to me as though I was a small child. Unless you are a small child or truly have the mentality of what, I will not speak down to you like that. I will repeat your quote though: > "But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member That quote is clearly an observation, not a call to action in itself. It is an observation that the US's notion of free speech is not at all universal, and can be confounding even to people with some quality ("sophistication", perhaps "worldliness" or other terms would be more helpful descriptors) that the author wouldn't expect it to confound. You're claiming that it's some kind of call to action against "unfettered free speech" (which we already don't have in the US anyways). Present an actual argument instead of taking a quote (properly attributed but sans context) and jump to conclusions that aren't in it. How hard is that to do? Learn how to construct and present arguments in ways that actually have a chance to persuade instead of making statements that verge on non sequiturs. Here, I'll help you: Link to the actual opinion piece [0]. It's clear from that that he's arguing in favor of hate speech laws (which is a slippery slope, I'm pretty sure a few "Christians" I know would like hate speech laws so they could stop me from calling them anti-Christians), and thinks there's already precedent for such laws. > The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites “imminent lawless action” or is likely to do so can be restricted. You didn't present that part though, I only stumbled on it because someone else linked to it in this thread. TL;DR: You are terrible at argumentation. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-america-needs-hate-speech-law/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-ameri...
- damnencryption 6y agoI agree with the sentiment solely because most sides of the political spectrum are doing the same. Donald trump rose to the fame with calling everything fake news. Somehow everyone now believes there is fake news so they don't trust outside their own echo chambers which is called fake news by someone else. I think it's media hacking another vulnerable parts of human beings. I see attempts to censor and attempts to fake being censored in order to hijack different vulnerabilities.
- nostromo 6y agoYou have the causality backwards. "Fake news" was not a Trump invention, it was a criticism originating from the political left against people that supported Trump with fake articles, such as the false article of the pope supporting Trump before the 2016 election. Trump, as he so often does, co-opted the attack and used it offensively. The same media that was fretting about fake news was suddenly being called fake news, which was when they decided they no longer liked the term. The Washington Post made this public and explicit, saying the media should no longer use the term they had popularized just months prior: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-to-retire-the-tainted-term-fake-news/2017/01/06/a5a7516c-d375-11e6-945a-76f69a399dd5_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-to-r...
- farias0 6y agoDon't you think this public worrying is deserved, given the rise of Facebook and algorithms, troll farms and everything else?
- damnencryption 6y agoWhat changed in the recent years is the amount of media time nutjobs on the internet get that everyone ignored back then. Nothing else. If you checked qanon groups before and after media attention, you will notice a steep increase in member count. There is a dilemma. Should we report and amplify their voice or should we shut up about an "increasing" problem? Some problems do disappear when you ignore them.
- Jtsummers 6y agoThey don't need the mainstream media to spread their nonsense. It spreads on FB and Twitter quite well, and was the reason I stopped following (and unfriended) a lot of people over the past several years. Hell, a few years ago my bartender tried to sell me on their nonsensical ideas.
- farias0 6y agoAre you sure the media started reporting on these fake news before they became relevant? What makes you believe this? I think the easiness with which algorithms + human psychology helps the propagation of fake news are well documented and widely understood.
- yokaze 6y agoSo, you are rejecting the premise that a lot of misinformation is spread and it has much wider reach than in the past? I would say it has, and I consider only reasonable that there is a desire to understand the mechanisms behind it. I would consider the effects net negative. No need to a concerted effort.
- ssambros 6y ago> So, you are rejecting the premise that a lot of misinformation is spread and it has much wider reach than in the past? No, but how do we jump to conclusion that government, government-controlled or government-aligned entity should be allowed to control the information we receive?
- triceratops 6y agoWho jumped to that conclusion?
- nprz 6y agoI am rejecting that premise, yes. If you expect major news outlets to accurately report the truth, and believe we should only rely on their interpretation of reality, you are misled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8mP2jN6bJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8mP2jN6bJI
- Broken_Hippo 6y agoI do expect every major news outlet to do what they can to accurately report the truth and not present it in ways that distort reality. It doesn't mean that you should rely only on their interpretation, but it does mean that you can do things like trust the numbers they give. This way, you don't get reports that, "x helps you be healthier!" when the study is really just showing that x culture has better marks on something OR a mouse study was showing promise, without reminding folks that most mouse studies don't work for humans (or that some mice are bred to make studies easier). I suppose the more damaging rhetoric would be presenting information that makes immigrants seem like criminals, when really, the crime rate is lower and the examples were isolated incidents. I'd extend this to places that people expect as much truth as is reasonable - for example, vitamins and supplements. We know that "supports..." or "may reduce..." is taken as fact. Ideally, you'd get your news from more than one source and if one source is almost always different from the others, you'd no longer use it as fact - but people aren't going to go through this process all that often if at all.
- bosswipe 6y agoIf I may paraphrase you, "it feels (without evidence) like there's a giant conspiracy across many organizations involving hundreds or thousands of people acting in coordination, this implies an unknown secret powerful central propaganda ministry that hatches plans to further upcoming moves".
- nprz 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
- bosswipe 6y agoI suspect that their is some level of coordination and conspiracy across right-wing propaganda channels such as your clip from Sinclair stations. Though all those Sinclair stations are one organization. But your suspicioun that Scientific American is in the know of a coming push for censorship and is tayloring propaganda on that basis makes absolutely no sense to me.
- nprz 6y agohttps://youtu.be/EuwmWnphqII?t=2119 https://youtu.be/EuwmWnphqII?t=2119
- specialist 6y agoBelatedly... Someone needs to update Herman's propaganda model to include how social media works. The filters are the same, of course. But the balance of power has shifted. eg Aggregators are now much more powerful than Advertisers. The update should also reflect how Twitter (for example) is now exploited to shape narratives. There's always been astroturf, but now it's much more effective. What Phillip Howard (Lie Machines) calls "computational propaganda".
- at-fates-hands 6y agoRichard Stengel was just appointed to Biden's transition team: Stengel wrote last year in a Washington Post op-ed that US freedom of speech was too unfettered and that changes must be considered: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-america-needs-hate-speech-law/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-ameri... Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley warned about Stengel’s appointment in a column Tuesday: “It would be difficult to select a more anti-free speech figure to address government media policy, one has to assume that Biden will continue the onslaught against this core freedom as president.” He noted that Biden himself had publicly advocated restrictions on speech during the campaign: “Biden called for greater speech controls on the Internet and denounced Twitter for allowing others to speak freely.” One side of the political aisle rallies against social media for censoring their posts while the other side says social media don't censor enough. I feel there is a simmering battle over a lot of our constitutionally protected rights which is about to reach a crescendo depending on what the Biden administration does in the next few years.
- justin66 6y agoBiden's transition team will include many Actual Republicans as well. Including the experts they consult with, you're talking about hundreds of people. It's a mistake to infer that he will or will not be basing policy positions solely on their opinions.
- specialist 6y agoIt's almost as if computation propaganda is trying to crowd out authentic speech by flooding the zone with bullshit.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoMakes me feel like people are just fed up with all the bullshit that's out there. A lot of people who feel like misinformation is a problem we can make progress on don't think censorship is the solution. It's a hard problem, and it's an unsolved one. Griping about it increases the pressure on people to find solutions.
- disown 6y agoFor most of the past decade, news companies demanded preferential treatment on social media and search. They wanted to be seen first and prominently. I guess that wasn't enough for them. Looks like in the 2020s, they are going to demand exclusive presence. They want nobody else to have a voice. Nobody else to have a say. Ultimatley, only traditional media gets to spread misinformation.